Amazon’s Fire TV and Fire TV Stick crypto-mining virus: Here's how to check if your device is safe

An old crypto-mining virus is reportedly hijacking Amazon’s Fire TV and Fire TV Stick devices and slowing them down drastically while mining cryptocurrency for miners. [caption id=“attachment_4139277” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The Amazon Fire TV Stick.[/caption] The virus called ADB.miner that is usually known to take over gadgets like Android-powered smartphones to mine cryptocurrency is now finding itself at home in a place it wasn’t really designed for, your Amazon Fire TV device. According to the folks who spotted the issue at XDA Forums, it is very easy to tell if you device is infected. When your Fire TV device seems to respond a bit too slowly or grids to a halt frequently, it’s clear that you are victim. There is another visual clue as detailed by AFTVnews was the pop-up notification which shows up with the word “Test” accompanied by the green Android robot as shown in the screenshot below. [caption id=“attachment_4509457” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Amazon Fire TV ADB miner virus show up as notification from time to time. Image: AFTVnews[/caption] So how do you get infected? Well, there’s some good news here. If you have stuck to the rules and never downloaded any illegal apps that come from other app stores apart from Fire Stick’s app store, then you will in all probability be safe. This is because the ADB.miner comes from those unsafe apps that have been side-loaded from unofficial sources. In short, these were apps that were not supposed to be running on your Fire Stick to begin with. And to install of side-load these unofficial apps, you will also need to unlock or enable your Amazon Fire TV’s developer options, found in Settings. So if those haven’t been enabled, there is a really strong chance that you are safe. What if you are infected? Well, the simplest way to clean up everything is to reset your Amazon Fire TV device or as the folks at AFTVnews recommend is to download Total Commander (from the Amazon App Store) to find the virus and clean the malware off your device.